Appendices
Appendix A: Planting and Maintenance
Appendix B: Pest and Disease Control
Peppers of all types are native to Mexico and parts of South America and play a critical role in these regional cuisines. In Mexico, peppers are valued not only for their spiciness, but also for their incredible range of flavor and versatility.
edible mexican gardens
My husband and I moved from the Boston area to Northern California in 1967. For a few days I was homesick and needed a reason to feel we had made the right decision. A former Bostonian friend had settled here a few years earlier and she invited us over for supper. Well, sir—she served tacos with homemade salsa. What a revelation! I’d never tasted anything so good—I was hooked. A few more Mexican meals and a trip to San Francisco and I knew I had found my spot in the sun.
Looking back, it’s amazing to me to see how, over the years, my day-to-day Yankee cooking has completely changed. Grilled cheese sandwiches somehow turned into quesadillas, my bread box always has tortillas, a comal (flat Mexican griddle) sits on the stove, ever ready to toast herbs or grill an onion, and chiles show up in so many of my meals that when members of my tender-tongued East Coast family come to visit, I have to change my whole repertoire.
My garden, too, reflects the south-of-the-border shift. Numerous trips to Mexico and much time spent in the Southwest, where Mexican culture dominates, not only changed many of the crops I grow but my garden aesthetic as well. As a landscape designer, I can design an English garden with the best of them—good enough, in fact, that on occasion I’ve had homesick Brits stand at the end of my walk and weep for home—but despite my English blood, my heart’s not in it. I keep coming back to an in-your-face, colorful garden style, all tangled with flowering vines and squash and filled with chiles and dahlias.
The gardens and recipes that I share with you in the following pages are from my years of experience, much of it from muddling through and still more learned from generous gardeners and cooks. I hope you find the information zestful, inspirational, and even more exciting in that the vegetables and herbs, and the cooking methods, are based in the Americas. I thoroughly enjoy Chinese and Italian vegetables, Southeast Asian herbs, and I glory in French cooking techniques, but over the years I find that growing and roasting great tomatoes and chiles, hominying corn, and stewing beans brings me truly home.
how to grow a mexican garden
Most of the vegetables in a Mexican garden are grown in a routine manner. The tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, and squash, for instance, are often the very same as or similar to those we usually grow in the United States.
Mexico is a huge country whose many climates range from tropical to temperate. Most gardeners in the United States can grow a good number of Mexico’s vegetables and herbs, but the nearer one lives to the Mexican border, the more options there will be for growing specific Mexican varieties.
Let’s start by surveying options open to gardeners in Canada and the northern U.S. They can grow numerous varieties of common vegetables used in Mexican cooking, such as tomatoes, Swiss chard, lettuce, radishes, white onions, and snap beans. They can also choose vegetables less common in the States but characteristic of Mexican cooking, such as many kinds of dry beans; some of the dent corns; jalapeños; purslane; tomatillos; round, light-colored zucchini-type squash, and the important herbs cilantro and epazote. Nurseries with a good selection of appropriate varieties for these short-season areas are Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Nichols Garden Seeds, Stokes Seeds, and Abundant Life Seed Foundation.
For more southerly gardeners, the array of authentic Mexican varieties is larger. Because the fall stays warm longer, they can grow day-length-sensitive varieties (varieties that don’t set fruit until the days get short in early fall) of winter squash and Mexican corn. There are also more chile options, plus the tender perennials, such as jícama and chayote, which need a long, warm growing season and a mild winter.
To obtain seeds of Mexican vegetables and herbs, consult the seed companies given in the Resources section of the book. Mexican seed companies are not cited, as they carry mostly commercial varieties of standard vegetables common in this country. Seeds of varieties favored by Mexican gardeners in the States can sometimes be purchased from seed racks in local Mexican grocery stores, especially in the spring. The rest of the varieties, including unusual Mexican herbs, are available from specialty mail-order nurseries or from local nurseries located in the Southwest.
In Mexico, most gardeners obtain their seeds from local purveyors, and if they are open-pollinated varieties, not hybrids, they keep the seeds from their plants from year to year.
Once you obtain your Mexican varieties, you may want to save your seeds too. See the sidebar entitled Saving Seeds for basic information. For specific information on saving the seeds of beans, corn, peppers, and tomatoes, see the “Encyclopedia of Mexican Vegetables.”
You will most probably get most of the seeds you want from the specialty seed companies listed in the Resources section but, if you visit Mexico, you can shop in the markets for an even larger selection. Most vegetable seeds in commercial packaging are OK to bring back home, except Mexican corn, which is confiscated at the border as illegal to bring into the United States. Another option is to visit a Mexican market near you to shop for seeds of pozole corn and dry beans. But when you grow these grocery store seeds out, be prepared to baby them for a few years. The folks I spoke with in the community garden in San José found it took two or three seasons to acclimatize the Mexican market corn, in particular, to their own gardens. Be aware, too, of the possibility that in wet, cold climates they may never acclimatize.
Seeds of Mexican varieties are sold in many Mexican markets in North America. They are generally available only in the spring.
Large blue buckets in a Yucatan market offers a variety of seeds and spices.
The harvest from one of my many Mexican gardens includes tomatoes, corn, chilis, and pumpkin.
[Saving Seeds]
I find saving seeds simple and satisfying process. The following general guidelines apply no matter what kind of seeds you are saving. See the “Encyclopedia of Mexican Vegetables” for more specific information on saving the seeds of beans, corn, peppers, squash, and tomatoes. In addition, everyone interested in seed saving will benefit from reading Seed
